Provençal peasants required no Grand Armée.
Despite the lure of adventure, no Brummies
Gunned for a scrap on the Boer Transvaal.
Roman kids coughed in British mist, for pay,
Plots of land, not hatred of enemies.
They’d rather Capri to Hadrian’s Wall.
Few are keen to ship sons for far outposts,
Where they watch supply routes, keep locals at bay,
Spread a culture they’ve hardly even known.
Sentinels drink, throw dice on foreign coasts,
Wait, through a tour’s blood and boredom, for the day
They’re thanked, debriefed, and, relieved, shipped back home.
Chess masters plot—predict, pause, praise the Lord.
The pieces can’t wait to get off the board.

Read on at Praxilla.

From the forthcoming collection All of You on the Good Earth (2013).

Publisher’s announcement:

Ernest Hilbert’s newest collection, All of You on the Good Earth, continues to explore the bizarre worlds of 21st-century America first glimpsed in his debut, Sixty Sonnets, which X.J. Kennedy hailed as “maybe the most arresting sequence we have had since John Berryman checked out of America” and “whose dark harmonies and omnivorous intellect remind the reader of Robert Lowell’s,” according to Adam Kirsch. Critics have called Hilbert’s poems “at once ironic, dark, and witty,” containing the “full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do,” “showy and spectacular,” “both seriously tough-minded and wryly self-chiding,” concluding that “the only other poet who plies risk against reward so deftly is Pound.” Poet and critic David Yezzi salutes Hilbert as “a twenty-first-century beatnik in Elizabethan ruff.”

At the end of the tumultuous year 1968, Apollo 8’s Commander Frank Borman described the earth-rise as sending “a torrent of nostalgia, of sheer homesickness, surging through me.” He signed off: “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas, and God bless all of you—all of you on the good Earth.” All of You on the Good Earth guides the reader through chambers occupied by visionary gravediggers, spaced-out movie stars and pugnacious comic book characters come to life, frenzied dropouts, sullen pirates, and unrelenting stalkers, noble war correspondents and cornered dictators, unlucky drunks and supercilious scientists, impatient goddesses and sad sea monsters, zoned-out denizens of Plutonian strip-clubs and earnest haunters of ancient ruins, the infamous Rakewell in TriBeCa and sea nymph Kalypso in a beach house at the Jersey shore, characters wandering an America demoralized by economic decline. These poems contain fasts and feasts, laments and love songs, histories, fantasies, and elegies, the amusing and heartbreaking debris of life on this world, all the while recalling Seneca’s dictum, non est ad astra mollis e terris via (“the road from the earth to the stars is not easy”).

“[Sixty Sonnets] delivers the full range of human types and stories, and nearly the whole breadth of what the sonnet can do. . . . We might see Hilbert as being God in these poems—as taking the all-gathering view of the merciful God who has room for all these lost ones, right along with the desperate fugitives, retired literary critics, crime victims, lovers, and godfathers. The poet as indwelling creator spirit? It fits for Hilbert: poet, from poietes, maker.” – Rattle